Speed creating

Elissa Blake

Spinning a yarn … Rachel Howe in the Now Hear This storytelling competition. Photo: Felix Barbalet

It's 9.50pm on a Wednesday in Oxford Street and the clock is ticking on two artists filling huge white canvases with black marks. One is rapidly drawing with a marker pen. The other is working more slowly with a paint brush, stepping back to see the whole image before carrying on in total concentration. Ten minutes to go.

A crowd of around 300 presses closer to the stage. Mobile phones hover overhead as punters take photos. A steady flow of tweets is projected on a wall. One says: ''Let Paint Spill''.

This is Secret Walls, a live art battle held in the Oxford Art Factory. With 90 minutes on the clock, two artists - usually graphic artists, illustrators, street artists or even tattoo artists - battle for supremacy using only black paint or black markers. There are no preliminary sketches and no starting again. The winner is decided by three votes: two from guest judges, and one from the screaming audience using a decibel meter.

The girl beside me says the fast-moving sketcher, George Hambov - aka Apeseven - is using too much black. ''There are too many lines and I think it should have more skulls showing through,'' she says. Her friend is outraged that slow-and-steady poster artist, Ben Brown, has forgotten to put an apostrophe in his tagline. ''I love his art but he can't spell!'' she complains.

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Secret Walls organiser Shannon McKinnon says live art is growing in Sydney with hundreds of art fans turning up to monthly events. ''What's so cool about it is you get to see genre-defying artists creating something right in front of your eyes,'' he says. ''It is so rare to see into someone's creative process.''

Painting isn't the only art practice drawing crowds. Slam poetry, slam storytelling and now slam theatre is on the rise, all of them pitting artist against artist in a timed competition, with crowds cheering them on.

Is this the beginning of art as a spectator sport? ''Yes it is, and it can only be a good thing,'' Miles Merrill, founder of the Australian Poetry Slam, says. ''Competition brings a wider audience into art forms and people have the opportunity to participate or to invest in an artist. They can choose a hero and watch them fall or rise. I'm really excited to see competition put in as an artifice, otherwise it's just a poetry reading.''

The ''slam'' concept started in a bar in Chicago in 1986. Poet Marc Smith thought it was indulgent for a poet to spend 20 minutes ''staring into their notebook and mumbling into a microphone'', says Merrill, a Chicagoan himself, who moved to Sydney 14 years ago.

Now, Merrill runs monthly poetry slams at Glebe's Friend in Hand Hotel and the annual Australian Poetry Slam. ''We get over 1000 poets each year and almost half of them are new each year,'' he says.

So why are people flocking to slam events? Merrill says one reason is that it offsets the amount of time we spend online. ''People are craving live experiences,'' he says. ''To go out and see a real human being creative in front of you is a rare and wonderful joy.''

Real humans are jumping up on stage to tell their five-minute true stories in Now Hear This, a monthly storytelling slam held at Arthouse Hotel in Pitt Street, Sydney. ''You never know who is going to get up or what they are going to say,'' organiser Melanie Tait says. ''There are taxi drivers and nurses and pilots and the audience is so appreciative that someone is being open and honest on stage.''

Tait says she was initially dubious about giving art a score. But after watching storytelling events in the US, she changed her mind. ''I found there is something incredibly fun and moving in the vulnerability of being in a competition,'' she says. ''Who wins doesn't really matter. But the scoring really engages the audience.''

Does it work for theatre, too? Playwright C.J. Johnson thinks so. He was one of 10 writers invited to pitch an idea to Griffin Theatre for its Rapid Write challenge. The winner then had to respond to a current news event and create a full-length play in just eight weeks. Johnson's Hollywood Ending opened at Griffin last night.

''It's been the most intellectually stimulating project I've ever worked on,'' Johnson says. ''When you work at such a rapid pace, it's always on the boil. It's been deeply satisfying. Nothing inspires like a deadline and this was the most intense I've ever met.''